Stringed instruments with hollow bodies configured to generate music were used by peoples of ancient civilizations. One type of such stringed instrument is the guitar. The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument displaying the essential features of a guitar, for example, is a 3,300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard, a Bronze Age people of Anatolia.
Guitars are commonly made and repaired by luthiers. The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers and/or a pick. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with either nylon or steel strings. Some modern guitars are made of various synthetic materials such as polycarbonate.
There are two primary families of guitars: acoustic and electric. Guitars and stringed musical instruments in general normally include a headstock with tuners associated with one end of a neck. Such neck defines a fret board with the opposing end of the neck associate with the guitar's body. For acoustic guitars, at some point along the body is a bridge secured to the body with a saddle. One or more strings are stretched from the tuners over the nut, over the neck/fret board (finger board) and over a top portion of the body (sound board) to contact points on the bridge saddle.
For electric guitars, at some point along the top surface of the body are electronic pickups in alignment with a bridge that is also secured to the body. One or more strings are stretched from the tuners over the neck and fret board and over an electronic pickups to contact points on the bridge.
The tone of an acoustic guitar is produced by the vibration of the strings, which is amplified by resonance within the hollow defined by the acoustic guitar's body causing the sound board (top/front surface of the body) to resonate. Such is a limitation of acoustic guitars as if one wishes to generate a louder sound, a bigger soundboard is required (i.e. a bigger body). Evolutions in technology, particularly in the area of electronics, resulted in the creation of the electric guitar around 1930. Electric guitars do not rely on resonance in the same way acoustic guitars do as electric guitars rely on an electric amplifier to amplify and electrically manipulate the tone of the string vibrations.
One problem with both acoustic and electric stringed instruments that has been the bane of many luthiers' and guitarists' existences relates to adjusting the “action” of the instrument. The distance from a string to a fret associated with a fret board (i.e. the “height” of the string relative to the fret board/frets) is generally referred to as the guitar's “action” (or string action). For the purposes of this document, such “action” will be referred to as the “string action” or perhaps simply “action”. Often a musician will choose to have the instrument's action set to different heights depending on the type of music being played or playing style favored. Lower action, lighter (thinner) strings, and electrical amplification lend the electric guitar to techniques less frequently used on acoustic guitars. These include tapping, extensive use of legato through pull-offs and hammer-ons (also known as slurs), artificial harmonics, volume swells, and use of a tremolo arm or effects pedals. Thus, certain musicians prefer to have a small distance between the fret board and string or “low” action, while others prefer a “high” action for various reasons, one of which is to avoid fret buzzing. Additionally, many players wish to have a predefined height between the strings and the face of the body of the guitar in the area where plucking or picking is performed. For the purposes of this document, we will refer to such attribute as the “pick action”. When the pick action is too small, a player has a tendency to hit the face of the guitar while strumming the strings.
Prior art devices, relating to how an instrument's neck is associated with such instrument's body, have been developed to allow for adjusting the “string action” of a stringed instrument. All such prior art devices, however, have their issues. Many such devices, while adjustable, must be locked in place after adjustment. Such a design requires the instrument's user to not only keep up an adjustment tool, but the tools necessary to unlock the device. Other such devices, while they work well for their intended purposes, required extensive modification to retrofit an existing guitar with such a device. Additionally, such retrofitted guitars will have visible modifications of which many users do not desire to be seen. Additionally, going back from such a retrofitted guitar to the stock configuration, if doable, requires extensive repairs. Further, such prior art devices are not easily incorporated into a manufacturing process making mass production of guitars with such features less economically feasible. Further, it is desirable to have a method of adjusting the “string action” without substantially affecting the “pick action”.
Finally, none of the devices define a universal neck/body association that would allow a music store customer (for example) to pick and choose the neck/body configuration, from a plurality of possible choices, for the guitar he wished to purchase. The Applicant's invention addresses all the above issues.